The Coming of Age of the Green Community: My Neighbourhood, My Planet

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What makes some people devote valuable time to making plans, raising money and making changes in their local community in order to protect and enhance their environment? This effort is, to many, intuitively futile. Crucially, the arguments for recruitment to these groups are undermined by a belief that even if the goals of environment protection were to be achieved, they would go largely unrewarded even in their own communities. And yet green community groups have been multiplying fast across Europe and other mature economies over the past few decades. This book explores the reasons for the loss of faith in governments to solve global and local environmental problems and explores the motivations that lie behind those who decide to set up community-scale environment organisations. It sets out to explore the strategies that keep groups going through challenging circumstances, or change tactics to react to political or financial realities. Erik Bichard combines the testimonies of dozens of group activists with historic evidence and the views of a range of commentators from a variety of disciplines to put forward reasons why some green community groups succeed while others fail. He concludes with a valuable prescription for both existing and emerging groups on how to be sustainable, both over time and in their actions.